Audition Notice: Hedda Gabler
Hedda Gabler Auditions
The Footlight Club is happy to announce upcoming auditions for Henrik Ibsen’s great social drama Hedda Gabler.
Director: Vincent Ratsavong
Performance Dates (this is a virtual/video production):
March 26th, 27th & April 3rd, 2021
Audition Requirements:
We are accepting video auditions for this production. Please complete the following steps to complete your video audition:
Prepare a 1-3 minute dramatic monologue.
Please film yourself performing this monologue
Please include a headshot and resume (if you have one) with your submission.
Please fill out this audition form and list your conflicts for the rehearsal and production period. Download the form and thoroughly fill out.
Be sure to list your conflicts for the rehearsals and production period. Some conflicts can be scheduled around if we know about them ahead of time.
EMAIL your video submission, headshot, resume, and audition form in ONE email to heddagablerflc@gmail.com no later than Sunday, December 27th, 2021, at 5:00pm EST.
Other Audition Info:
Callbacks, if required, will be held on Wednesday, December 30th from 7:00-9:00pm on Zoom. Details to follow if you are called back.
We may not hold callbacks, and if callbacks are held, not all roles require a callback.
Actors needed at callbacks will be notified by end of day on December 28th. Actors called back will be given sides to work on.
All actors will be notified of casting results following callbacks.
If you have any questions not addressed here, please email our team.
Producing a Play during a Pandemic
The primary concern of The Footlight Club is the health and safety of its performers, production staff, members, and friends. Hedda Gabler will be a virtual production with possible pre-recorded elements. This means that all actors should expect to perform safely from the comfort of their own homes. If health and safety guidelines and performers’ willingness allow, some aspects of this production may be filmed in advance. No performer will be asked to meet in person unless they feel comfortable doing so and no casting decisions will be made based on a performers’ willingness. If you have any questions regarding these policies, please email heddagablerflc@gmail.com.
About Rehearsals:
Rehearsals will be held via Zoom and begin the week of January 3rd-8th. Rehearsals are (tentatively) projected to run Sunday/Wednesday/Thursday with a time that best serves the cast. Tech Week runs from March 21st-25th.
SHOW SUMMARY:
Hedda Gabler is restricted and bored by her new middle-class environment. Hedda plays out her own fantasies and psychological games with those nearest to her to an ultimately costly end. The play opens as Hedda and her academic husband, George Tesman, return from their honeymoon. Soon after, Hedda is reacquainted with an old school friend, Mrs. Elvsted, and the brilliant but wayward writer Eilert Lövborg. Hedda finds pleasure in manipulating Lövborg into ruining both his career and his relationship with Mrs. Elvsted. Hedda Gabler is a heightened drama that crumbles into a costly end. The play consists of four acts that explore issues of power, control, and social expectation.
THE CHARACTERS:
The Footlight Club welcomes and encourages qualified performers of all ages, races, ethnicities, abilities, genders, and body types to audition.
Hedda Gabler
Hedda, the daughter of the great General Gabler and the pregnant wife of Jörgen Tesman, is a beautiful, aristocratic, intelligent woman, loaded with social grace and a steely, clear, dispassionate charisma. She behaves cruelly and destructively toward those around her while seeking to entertain and satisfy herself, going so far as to drive her comrade from adolescence, Ejlert Lövborg, to suicide. At the end of the play, to avoid scandal and escape the pettiness of bourgeois life, Hedda shoots herself with her father’s pistol.
Jörgen (George) Tesman
Tesman is Hedda’s husband and the holder of a University Fellowship in cultural history: he specializes in medieval domestic crafts. He is considered an outstanding member of his society, one destined to attain the highest social distinction. For all that, however, he is also conventional, boring, mediocre, and sometimes even sappily sentimental. He talks constantly about the mundane details of his studies, he is sappily sentimental, and he is an anxious climber of the career ladder. Tesman might be read in part as Ibsen’s sketch of the conventional bourgeois man in modern society.
Ejlert Lövborg
Tesman’s rival for a prestigious professorship, Ejlert Lövborg is a visionary historian and sociologist. He is also, like Hedda herself, ill-adapted to modern life—in his case, he is unable to drink in moderation. The despairing thing about Lövborg, as Ibsen has noted, is that he wants to control the world by seeing into its future, but he can’t even control himself. Lövborg’s relationship with Mrs. Elvsted, his helpmate and muse, so inflames Hedda’s jealousy that she at last sets about affecting Lövborg’s destruction.
Mrs. Thea Elvsted
Mrs. Elvsted was once romantically involved with Jörgen Tesman. After Ejlert Lövborg’s fall from social grace, Mrs. Elvsted and her husband, a sheriff, welcomed Lövborg into their home as a tutor for their children. During that time, Mrs. Elvsted served as Lövborg’s helpmate and muse, and also seemed to fall in love with him, committing herself to him, body and soul. She is as conventional as Tesman, in her way, and somewhat timid, but Mrs. Elvsted also has a capacity for passionate, courageous commitment that is rare in Ibsen’s world—even Hedda is afraid of scandal—and this makes her, however quietly, somewhat heroic.
Judge Brack
Judge Brack is a shrewd and respected man in society, a cynical old bachelor, and a regular guest at the Tesmans’ villa. He takes pleasure in having a hand in other people’s business, as when he arranges the Tesmans’ finances and delivers professional news to Tesman himself. Brack repeatedly propositions Hedda, and she evades him time after time. Their games of sexual innuendo, veiled threats, and a shared world-weariness provide both with a reprieve from the stale monotony of their lives. In the end, however, Judge Brack at last gets the upper hand over Hedda—but Hedda surprises him by doing the unthinkable.
Miss Juliane Tesman (Aunt Julle)
Jörgen Tesman’s paternal aunt, Juliane Tesman is a chatty woman who cared for her nephew after his parents’ deaths. Though Jörgen is an adult, his Aunt Julle, still dotes on him, lending him money, bringing him sentimental gifts, and showering him with praise and encouragement. She looks forward to the day when he and his wife Hedda will bring a child into the world.
Berte
Berte is a plain, kind, dedicated maid who served in Juliane Tesman’s household before transferring into the service of Jörgen and Hedda. Miss Tesman and her nephew are very fond of Berte, but Hedda decidedly is not. She is very severe with the maid, who fears she won’t be able to accommodate Hedda’s grand, aristocratic ways.